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Comments on How can Worldbuilding successfully support creative exploration?
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How can Worldbuilding successfully support creative exploration?
The Worldbuilding proposal currently includes this bullet:
We would accept a fairly broad range of question types. Within reasonable limitations, questions that require focused brainstorming or fishing for ideas, as well as questions that elicit well considered opinions and concept analysis would all be welcome here.
"Focused brainstorming" can work well or poorly depending on what "focused" means. I'm not sure how "fishing for ideas" would work. There is a spectrum. At one end are questions like "I have these constraints and have worked out X, Y, and Z but am not sure what to do about W". The question about how a fire-breathing creature safely breathes (air) seems like a good example of focused scope -- we have a set of requirements, a good level of background, and a clear goal. The question already has two good answers. And then, at the other end of the spectrum, one could imagine questions like "how do I make a fire-breathing dragon?", which sounds like the start of a discussion with friends or a Quora thread, but it's quite unbounded. When the question has 57 answers each addressing a different part of the problem and making different assumptions, that's pretty hard on the reader. It's probably even hard on the person who asked the question.
I want Worldbuilding to be able to support the kinds of creativity that don't always have a full set of starting requirements; sometimes you don't know what you don't know, and you can't specify what you don't know. Collaboratively fleshing out a problem space seems like something this community will need to be able to do.
How do we support that in a responsible way?
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We have to understand that a Q&A worldbuilding site isn't going to support all things all worldbuilders want to talk about. We need to focus on what fits well with our Q&A format.
One thing that just doesn't fit is a discussion. That means some things will be outright disallowed, and others need to be molded to fit the Q&A format. Your example of "How do I make a fire-breathing dragon?" would be too unfocused and broad to be allowed.
However, that doesn't mean the site is useless to someone that wants to explore fire-breathing dragon designs. This is accomplished by breaking down the broad discussion into more focused individual questions, like:
- What plausible biological processes can produce combustible gas in a dragon?
- How much [hydrogen, acetylene, methane, ethane, whatever] would it take to breath enough fire to kill a 12th century knight in armor? Just incapacitate a goat?
- What volume would that take in a creature to store that much gas?
- How long would it plausibly take for a dragon-size creature to produce the gas?
- How many food calories would it take to produce?
This technique might not work with really wild brainstorming discussions, but I think it can work with much of the possible content.
The problem will not be the inability to break wild concepts down into manageable more defined chunks, but getting people to actually do it. We can have pages of descriptions and examples, and people won't read them, ignore them, or do what they want anyway (I just want to talk about dragons. This site isn't my problem.). Then there will be endless time-wasting volunteer-dissipating drama about how we're unwelcoming to newbies (it has nothing to do with newbies other than they are less likely to follow the rules), stifling creativity, questions should never be closed, etc. We already get enough of this stuff with the existing more narrowly focused sites.
I don't see this working out.
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As was pointed out in a comment, the questions above used as examples of breaking a high level vague concept into smaller more well-defined pieces appropriate for a Q&A site would fit today on the existing Scientific Speculation site.
It think this could be done with most anything someone envisions being asked on the proposed Worldbuilding site. It would be an interesting exercise to see how that works. We could try it with proposed Worldbuilding questions. I think in the end it needs to be done anyway to create questions that result in meaningful answers.
What would answers to "How do I make a fire-breathing dragon?" be anyway? Start with a cow, add wings, and the rest is magic? That doesn't sound useful. I am realizing now that breaking things down is not only to allow utilizing Q&A appropriately, but it is also necessary to get any meaningful results regardless of the rules.
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